Re: Exclusive pumping feeling discouraged

Have you considered trying a course of a different antibiotic for the recurrent mastitis/plugged ducts? I know someone who had mastitis more or less constantly for the first 6 months of her baby's life. It would flare up, she'd see her doc, and he'd put her on antibiotics. She'd take the entire course (she's no dope!) and get better for a few weeks, only to have the mastitis come back. Finally, she was sent to our closest level 1 hospital where someone took a culture of her milk and discovered- and this is going to come as a huge shocker, I know - that she was infected by a drug-resistant strain of bacteria that wasn't vulnerable to anything she had been taking so far. One course of the right antibiotic later, and she was mastitis-free for the remainder of her nursing journey.

Re: Exclusive pumping feeling discouraged

An update to my last message from a few years ago. So I ended up exclusively pumping for 13 months with my child. I now have a 2 month old who I am successfully breastfeeding, thankfully no exclusive pumping, however when I go back to work I will have to pump during the day 3 and 1/2 days per week which I am not looking forward to and worried about. After now seeing what it is like to spend time with my baby, I wish that I hadn't pumped so long and would have stopped breastfeeding earlier before things got out of hand with my first. I barely got to enjoy my son as an infant due to pumping. The problem is that I couldn't stop the pump due to getting clogs and mastitis so often. It was really a nightmare affecting my marriage and work and friends. I ended up having to pump on a plane and in an airport on two separate trips also which was awful. I wish I would have spent more time with my baby even knowing how good it is to have breast milk. In the end it really wasn't worth it. Now with my second child, I didn't realize you could actually feel semi- rested with a newborn at least for an hour or so a day. The only way for me to stop the pump with my first child was to take the antibiotic Bactrim and decrease the pumping time by a minute in one session every few days as long as I didn't get a clog.